Events

Workshops, Colloquia, and Tutorials are organised regularly by the GK and the Forschergruppe Arbeitsgedächtnis. All events are open to everyone who is interested. If you have questions or comments, please contact the colloquium organiser, Susann Lingel or Olav Mueller-Reichau. We also have an e-mail list, to which announcements for upcoming colloquia are regularly sent.

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Wintersemester 2006/7 (see also Past Events)

Event distribution and indefinites in Spanish and Portuguese

In this talk I study the semantic properties of plural indefinites in European Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. I pursue the transparent form-meaning hypothesis in my semantic analysis, i.e., that as an item gets bigger in form, it acquires more semantic properties. I address some problems that event distributivity presents for the hypothesis.

Transitivity splits, transitivity alternations and case competition

The present talk deals with cross-linguistic variation in case-marking patterns and constraints restricting such variation. In the first part I address, elaborating on the earlier typological work by Tsunoda, a typology of ‘transitivity splits’ (that is variation in case marking conditioned by the verb class of the predicate). Further, I set up a two-dimensional hierarchy for transitivity splits which can be used to predict which case frames would be preferred by different verb types. Building on the previous work in the functional-typological and optimality-theoretic traditions, I propose a set of universal, functionally based constraints that can account for cross-linguistic variation in case-marking patterns of individual verb types. In the final part (based on a joint work with Helen de Hoop) I present a (bidirectional) OT analysis of (“fluid”) case alternations (i.e. alternations found with the same verbal lexeme). It will be shown how Bidirectional OT can account for fluid alternations on the basis of the same set of ranked constraints that accounts for the general pattern of case marking.

Case and Agreement: The Syntax of Argument Dependencies

In this talk I will examine the various components that enter into the formation of Argument-dependencies: case, agreement and EPP. I will argue that a refined view of feature checking allows us to reduce the traditional EPP to Person-agreement, while case is the factor underlying generalized EPP effects.

Icelandic passives and middles and the structure of v

In this talk, I analyze Icelandic eventive passives, adjectival passives, and middle constructions in terms of a decomposition of verbal structure into morphological and semantically motivated components. The result is that what is often called "v" in recent literature is decomposed into component parts. Rather than a single head denoting causation, assigning accusative case, introducing the external argument, providing verbal categorial features, hosting successive-cyclic wh-movement, and triggering phasal spell-out, I suggest that there is a rich internal structure to v and that each of these functions can be localized differently.

Eine ‘amorphematische’ Analyse der lateinischen Nominalflexion

In diesem Vortrag soll die lateinische Nominalflexion als Beispiel eines komplexen morphologischen Systems vorgestellt werden, das alle Symptome des ‘flektierenden Syndroms’ zeigt (homonyme und synonyme Exponenten, ‘extended exponence’ und ‘overlapping exponence’, Genuseinteilung, unterschiedlich strukturierte Deklinationskassen, usw.). Im Mittelpunkt steht die Frage, wie in einem derartigen System (das den Erwartungen klassischer Morphemmodelle nicht genügt) die Form-Funktions-Beziehung ‘funktioniert’.
Ich lege eine nicht zeichenhaften Auffassung morphologischer Markierung zugrunde, nach der die Funktion morphologischer Markierungen hier nicht darin liegt, als ‘Exponenten’ von ‘Inhalten’ zu fungieren, sondern darin, Formen unterschiedlicher Funktion nur zu unterscheiden: Eine funktionale Distinktion wird zum Ausdruck gebracht, indem sie mit einer formalen Differenzierung korreliert wird. Für die lateinische Nominalflexion sollen (i) die auszudrückenden funktionalen Distinktionen, (ii) die zur formalen Differenzierung genutzten Ausdrucksmittel und (iii) die Art der Korrelation untersucht werden. Die zunächst eher verwirrende Vielfalt der Abhängigkeiten und Querverbindungen wird auf eine einfache Abbildungsbeziehung im Sinne Karl Bühlers zurückgeführt.

Some Concepts and Consequences of Stablerian Minimalist Grammars

I will review recent work on Stablerian Minimalist Grammars touching on formal and empirical issues involved in the treatment of (late) adjunction, scrambling, and multiple wh-movement. One of my concerns will be the imposition of locality constraints and how this affects the complexity of the resulting grammars.

A deletion analysis of null subjects: French as a case study

One often-noted consequence of the general adoption of the copy theory of movement since its reintroduction in Chomsky (1993) has been the collapse of the typology of empty categories in terms of the values of the features [±anaphoric, ±pronominal] (see, inter alia, Hornstein (1999:77-78), Manzini & Roussou (2000) for discussion). The non-pronominal empty categories of government-binding theory and related work, i.e. NP-trace and wh-trace, are now generally thought to be copies; their silence is the result of a PF-deletion process affecting non-heads of chains (see in particular Nunes (1995, 2004)). The status of the pronominal empty categories is less clear, however. There has been a considerable discussion of the status of the pronominal anaphor PRO, naturally connected to the question of the nature of the various types of “control” dependency (Boeckx & Hornstein (2003, 2004), Culicover & Jackendoff (2001), Davies & Dubinsky (2004), Hornstein (1999, 2003), Landau (2000, 2003, 2004), Manzini & Roussou (2000), Martin (1996, 2001), O’Neil (1997)). The question of the status of the “pure pronominal” empty category pro is also uncertain; many authors (including Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou (1998), Barbosa (1995, 2006), Manzini & Savoia (2005), Nash & Rouveret (1997), Ordoñez (1997), Platzack (2004), Pollock (1997)) have proposed that the pronominal property of the head bearing subject-agreement features, observed to characterise consistent null-subject languages since Rizzi (1982), may be enough to derive the null-subject parameter and that, as a corollary, the idea that the canonical subject position is occupied by pro is not required, which in turn implies that the Extended Projection Principle either does not need to be satisfied or can be satisfied by something other than a DP occupying the relevant specifier position in these languages. This idea was first put forward by Borer (1986) (see also Borer (1989:70-71)), and, following her terminology, we can refer to this type of approach as the “I-subjects” approach to null subjects (the idea being that I, as the functional head bearing subject agreement, has the subject role).

In the first part of this paper I want to put forward a new suggestion for accounting for the core cases of pro in consistent, agreement-rich, null-subject languages of the Italian type, one which owes much to, but departs from and develops, the ideas in Holmberg (2005). An interesting facet of the analysis is that it also sheds some light on another issue that arises in the context of the copy theory of movement: the question of the conditions under which identical copies are deleted (and indeed the further question of identifying the occurrences of copies). In the second part of the paper, I will apply the analysis to pro in French; this will lead to a revision and updating of the analysis of French subject enclitics proposed in Sportiche (1999), as well as a rough characterisation of some aspects of register variation in French. On both of these points, my proposals largely converge with those in Zribi-Hertz (1994).

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Movement to Spec,CP and Linearization

We will discuss cases of non-wh-movement to Spec,CP, approaches to their unified analysis based on top/foc-feature checking, accent movement, remnant movement, and partial (scattered) deletion, and finally our proposal along the lines of relativized cyclic linearization (cf. Fox & Pesetsky 2004).

Past Events